Description

Writing Program Administration at Small Liberal Arts Colleges presents an empirical study of the writing programs at one hundred small, private liberal arts colleges. Jill M. Gladstein and Dara Rossman Regaignon provide detailed information about a type of writing program not often highlighted in the scholarly record and offer a model for such national, multi-institutional research. Utilizing the mixed methods approach of grounded theory, Gladstein and Regaignon weave together survey, interview, and focus group data, site document analysis, and institutional history. They describe the writing programs at small colleges today as being dominated by writing across the curriculum-based approaches to writing instruction and the writing centers as emphasizing peer tutoring, and hence the development of undergraduate students as leaders and scholars. For small colleges, the movement toward vertical writing curricula, professionalized leadership positions, and innovative writing assessments occurs when institutions deepen or reaffirm their commitment to writing across the curriculum. In addition, Writing Program Administration at Small Liberal Arts Colleges offers a heuristic for understanding and comparing writing programs within and across institutions.

About the Authors

Jill M. Gladstein is Associate Professor of English and directs the Writing Associates Program at Swarthmore College, which received a CCCC Writing Program Certificate of Excellence. She is one of the co-founders and the current chair of the Small Liberal Arts College-Writing Program Administrators consortium. She has published on writing centers, writing fellows programs, and writing program administration. Her articles have appeared in WPA: Writing Program Administration and Across the Disciplines.

Dara Rossman Regaignon is Associate Professor of English and Director of College Writing at Pomona College. She is one of the co-founders of the Small Liberal Arts College-Writing Program Administrators consortium. Her articles have appeared in Pedagogy, WPA: Writing Program Administration, WAC Journal, and Victorian Literature and Culture.